This, again, is a recurrent note with Montaigne; and much of the argument of the Apology is typified in the sentence:—
"What greater vanity can there be than to go about by our proportions and conjectures to guess at God?"
(c) But there is a yet more striking coincidence between a passage in the essay[103] of Judging of Others' Death and the speech of Edmund[104] on the subject of stellar influences. In the essay Montaigne sharply derides the habit of ascribing human occurrences to the interference of the stars—which very superstition he was later to support by his own authority in the Apology, as we have seen above, in the passage on the "power and domination" of the celestial bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Cæsar's sayings as to his star, and the "common foppery" as to the sun mourning his death a year.
"And a thousand such, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so easily cony-catched, deeming that our own interests disturb heaven, and his infinity is moved at our least actions. 'There is no such society between heaven and us that by our destiny the shining of the stars should be as mortal as we are.'"
There seems to be an unmistakable reminiscence of this passage in Edmund's speech, where the word "foppery" is a special clue:
"This is the excellent foppery of the world! that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and traitors by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by divine thrusting on...."
(d) Again, in Macbeth (1606), the words of Malcolm to Macduff[105]:
"Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak, Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break"
—an idea which also underlies Macbeth's "this perilous stuff, which weighs upon the heart"—recalls the essay[106] Of Sadness, in which Montaigne remarks on the
"mournful silent stupidity which so doth pierce us when accidents surpassing our strength overwhelm us," and on the way in which "the soul, bursting afterwards forth into tears and complaints ... seemeth to clear and dilate itself"; going on to tell how the German Lord Raisciac looked on his dead son "till the vehemency of his sad sorrow, having suppressed and choked his vital spirits, felled him stark dead to the ground."